Page 199 - Essencials of Sociology

172 cHAPteR 6 Deviance and social control

Down-to-Earth Sociology

Islands in the Street: Urban Gangs in the United States

angs, part of urban life around the world, can be ruthless. surprising, but in some neighborhoods, gangs protect resi-
Just to gain respect, gang members can harm others dents from outsiders and spearhead political change (Kontos
G(Densley 2012). Let’s look at why people join gangs. et al. 2003). The boys also saw the gang as an alternative to
For more than ten years, sociologist Martín Sánchez- the dead-end—and deadening—jobs held by their parents.
Jankowski (1991) did participant observation of thirty-seven Neighborhood residents are ambivalent about gangs.
African American, Chicano, Dominican, Irish, Jamaican, On the one hand, they fear the violence. On the other
and Puerto Rican gangs in Boston, hand, gang members are the children
Los Angeles, and New York City. The of people who live in the neighbor-
gangs earned money through gambling, hood, many of the adults once be-
arson, mugging, armed robbery, and longed to gangs, and some gangs
selling moonshine, drugs, guns, stolen provide better protection than the
car parts, and protection. Sánchez- police.
Jankowski ate, slept, and fought with the Particular gangs will come and go,
gangs, but by mutual agreement he did but gangs will likely always remain part
not participate in drug dealing or other of the city. As functionalists point out,
illegal activities. He was seriously injured gangs fulfill needs of poor youth who
twice during the study. live on the margins of society.
Contrary to stereotypes, Sánchez-
Jankowski did not find that the motive
for joining was to escape a broken
home (there were as many members from intact families as
from broken homes) or to seek a substitute family (the same For Your Consideration
number of boys said they were close to their families as those ↑ What functions do gangs fulfill (what needs do they meet)?
who said they were not). Rather, the boys joined to gain ac- ↑ Suppose that you have been hired as an urban planner for
cess to money, to have recreation (including sex and drugs), the city of Los Angeles. How could you arrange to meet the
to maintain anonymity in committing crimes, to get protec- needs that gangs fulfill in ways that minimize violence and
tion, and to help the community. This last reason may seem encourage youth to follow mainstream norms?

for misleading investors. In 2012, Citigroup paid a fine of over a half billion dollars
for deceiving investors in subprime mortgages (Kapner 2012). Another big-name crimi-
nal is Bank of America, which paid one billion dollars for its lawbreaking (Raice and
Timiraos 2012). Despite their many crimes, not one of these corporate crime chiefs spent
a day in jail.
If these same executives had used guns to rob people on the street, you know what
would have happened. White-collar crime, in contrast, is seldom taken seriously. This
is unfortunately so even when those crimes result in death. In the 1930s, workers were
hired to blast a tunnel through a mountain in West Virginia. The company knew the
silica dust would kill the miners, and in just three months about 600 died (Dunaway
2008). No owner went to jail. In the 1980s, Firestone executives recalled faulty tires in
Saudi Arabia and Venezuela but allowed them to remain on U.S. vehicles. When their
tires blew out, about 200 Americans died (White et al. 2001). Not a single Firestone
executive went to jail.
Consider this: Under federal law, causing the death of a worker by willfully violating
safety rules is a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in prison. Yet to harass a wild
burro on federal lands is punishable by a year in prison (Barstow and Bergman 2003).
At $500 billion a year (Reiman and Leighton 2010), “crime in the suites” costs more
than “crime in the streets.” This refers only to dollar costs. The physical and emotional
costs are another matter. For example, no one has figured out a way to compare the
suffering of rape victims with the pain of elderly couples who lost their life savings to
Madoff’s white-collar fraud.